Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeBusinessFRAAZO Raises $11M In Series A By Sixth Sense Ventures And Others

FRAAZO Raises $11M In Series A By Sixth Sense Ventures And Others

FRAAZO is set to expand operations pan-India, while cashing in on the unprecedented digital adoption within the fragmented fresh food market.

FRAAZO, announced the close of a fresh $11 million Series A financing round of Equity funding led by Sixth Sense Ventures. Sixth Sense is joined by NABARD backed NAB-VENTURES and existing investors Equanimity Ventures, Manish Choksi, Vice Chairman and member of the Board of Directors of Asian Paints Limited, and Apar Group also participated in this round.

Through a network of micro-fulfilment stores, FRAAZO is capable of delivering farm-fresh fruits and vegetables within 30 minutes. Having successfully proven its model in Mumbai, it has catered to ap-proximately 1 million orders within a year of being launched in the pandemic. The $300+ billion fruits and vegetables market is seeing an increasing shift towards digital, with the online grocery segment growing at a 50% CAGR, pushed even further by the behaviour changes due to the pandemic. With the current fund raise, FRAAZO is set to expand operations pan-India, while cashing in on the unprece-dented digital adoption within the fragmented fresh food market.

Indiaā€™s foremost fully integrated vertical supply-chain for perishables, FRAAZOā€™s custom-built tech-nology stack is aligned with the needs of the fresh produce supply chain. With a data driven demand forecasting engine, FRAAZO is able to accurately match demand and supply for every catchment thereby reducing supply chain losses, improving farmer income, and offering daily savings to its cus-tomers.

Commenting on the fund raise and growth plans, Atul Kumar, Co-founder and CEO, FRAAZO, said, ā€œWe are thrilled by the support of ambitious, successful investors who see the disruptive potential of technology in building D2C brands. The need for hygiene, digital convenience, and customer service has never been greater, especially with quality inequity and disparities in service levels across tradi-tional channels. Targeting 1,000 centres across the country, FRAAZO aims to become Indiaā€™s leading fruits and vegetables player, with a capability to deliver fresh produce to a customerā€™s doorstep within 15 minutes of ordering.

Nikhil Vora, Founder and CEO, Sixth Sense Ventures, said, ā€œFruits and vegetables, the largest cat-egory in perishables, is completely fragmented, offline, with no MRP constraint, nor GST ā€“ this, cou-pled with significant supply-chain moat, and high order frequency, makes it a highly scalable online opportunity! Verticalisation of supply-chain is critical for perishables, which is where horizontal gro-cery players have found it challenging, and FRAAZO has been able to address this by their fully-opti-mised fresh supply-chain. With a frequency-driven model, supply-chain moat, and a remarkable cross-functional team, coupled with product extensions to drive higher AOVs, FRAAZO is poised to domi-nate the perishables space. FRAAZO meets our sweet spot of investing in super scalable spaces, first-gen founders with a highly motivated entrepreneurial team, leveraging the change in behaviour of the evolved Consumers of Tomorrow!ā€

NABARD and NABVENTURES, Chairman, Dr. G. R. Chintala, said, ā€œThe direct sourcing sub-stantially increase farmersā€™ income and provides them seamless access to urban markets at attractive prices. With this investment, NABVENTURES is looking to develop and strengthen the evolving D2C fresh food ecosystem.ā€

Rajesh Sehgal, Managing Partner, Equanimity Investments, one of the early backers of the FRAAZO team, added, ā€œFRAAZO is a promising platform for sourcing of fruits, vegetables and other fresh produce directly from farmers that has excelled in its on-the-ground execution with a strong foun-dation built on freshness, traceability, and timeliness of delivery. With this current round and strong investor base, sky seems to be the limit.

Source: Business World

RELATED ARTICLES
- Advertisment -

Most Popular

Recent Comments